Forest Service staff commonly inflated visitor numbers

[jon]

"Forest Service staff commonly inflated visitor numbers in hopes of getting more money for recreational facilities."

The USFS has been willing say and do just about anything in order to prop uptheir failing efforts to turn pay-to-play recreation on forest lands intoits next business. But now the chickens are coming home to roost and manyformly-accepted concepts are being conclusively proved as false.

Whether the USFS has been deliberately misleading Congress and the AmericanPeople is something we may never know. But as the following article makespainfully clear, the very underpinning of this entire House of Cards havebeen scientifically proved to be dead wrong.

For once, the USFS is not relying upon data furnished to them by theentirely bogus, self-serving, American Recreation Coalition-funded, RoperStarch Survey http://www.funoutdoors.com/research.html.

For once, the USFS is using real data and these data reveal that AmericansARE NOT flocking to their public lands. Americans are staying away in drovesand have been doing so since long before the events of 911.

The big question I have at this point is this:"How will the USFS and their private partners respond?"

Will they admit that pay-to-play recreation was an ill-conceived idea andthat fee-demo was a dismal failure that alienated the public -- keepingpeople from their lands and engendering animosity directed at the USFSitself.

OR, will they now try to present a fallacious augment which claims that thepublic simply demands bigger and better infrastructure and that until suchinfrastructure is built on publiclands using private dollars, and until theUSFS is better able to compete with other entertainment alternatives, theycan not be expected to successfully "lure" paying customers to public lands?

Scott

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http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/oregonian/index.ssf?/xml/story.ssf/html_standard.xsl?/base/news/100582895726220192.xml

Environmental NewsSurvey supplants guesswork in estimating forest visitors

11/15/01

MICHAEL MILSTEIN

About three-quarters of a billion hikers, sightseers and other visitors havesuddenly vanished from national forests, after a new tally proved thatearlier counts were vastly inflated and based more on guesswork than fact.

Instead of the nearly 1 billion annual forest visitors reported to Congressand cited until recently by U.S. Forest Service officials, including formerChief Mike Dombeck, the new figures show that about 209 million peopleactually visit national forests each year.

The sharp revision surprised Forest Service officials who had been toutingnational forests as the leading federal provider of recreation, claimingthat forests annually draw more than three times as many people as live inthe United States. They quietly have removed the earlier, higher count fromWeb sites and publications.

"It's definitely lower than we thought it would be," said Dennis Bschor,head of recreation for the agency. "But we're still serving a whole lot ofpeople."

The lower visitor tally is unlikely to undercut Forest Service funding forcampgrounds, restrooms and such, because many in Congress doubted the 1billion figure anyway. But it may reform the way forest recreation fundinggets handed out by putting the most money where the most visitors are, suchas the Northwest.

"Substantial challenges" "I wouldn't expect it to have a huge impact onfunding amounts, because everyone realizes there are still substantialchallenges facing forests in the Rocky Mountains and the Northwest," saidJosh Penry, staff director for the House forest subcommittee, which overseesthe Forest Service. "Where that data will be most useful is in focusingresources where they're really needed."

National forests in the Northwest have some of the heaviest recreational usein the country, although many have deteriorating facilities.

The reduced visitor count emerged this fall from a new Forest Service usesurvey, now in its second year. Until the survey began, forests countedvisitors through a loose system that officials now admit added the samevisitors as many as four or five times.

The same visitors, for instance, were counted as new visitors each time theystopped at a different campground, visitor center or boat ramp. Differentnational forests used different means to estimate users -- some employingtraffic counters, others counting people visually and others depending onformulas.

"Mostly, we guessed," said Sue Kocis, a leader of the Forest Service's newNational Visitor Use Monitoring Project.

Millions of people speeding through national forests on interstate highwayswere counted as visitors, even if they never set foot in the forest. AndForest Service staff commonly inflated visitor numbers in hopes of gettingmore money for recreational facilities.

"Incentive to overcount" "There was budget incentive to have more than yourneighbor," said Kocis, who spent years pushing for a better system. "Andeven though there was an incentive to overcount, we didn't provide thebudget or training on how to count accurately."

In a report to Congress earlier this year, the Forest Service reported that920 million people had visited national forests in 2000, more than threetimes as many as the 287 million who went to national parks, the next mostfrequented federal lands.

Dombeck, the former chief, said in speeches stressing the recreational valueof forests that national forest visits would soon top 1 billion, more thanthree times the national population. Agency officials, including the currentchief, Dale Bosworth, have dropped that number.

The new counting project closed loopholes and leeway in the earlier system,and it set up a uniform approach to gauge recreational use on each nationalforest and learn how satisfied visitors are with facilities. Visitor surveysare conducted on one-quarter of all national forests each year.

"What we wanted to do was get accurate information for planning andmanagement of the forests," Kocis said. "Our goal is, how do we best serveour visitors, not how do we best serve ourselves to get more money."

A margin for error Based on the first two years of new information, theForest Service now reports 209 million national forest visits in 2000, withan error rate of 17 percent, or 36 million. The error rate should narrow asfurther surveys and counts refine the numbers in future years, Kocis said.

Another 258 million people drove through national forests, the new countreported, but they no longer are figured as actual forest visitors.

In Oregon and Washington, the Forest Service had reported almost 100 millionvisits to national forests but dropped the figure to 34 million under thenew count.

The new numbers indicate that national parks, with 286 million visitors in2000, actually record more visitors than national forests do.

In surveys, visitors said they were mainly drawn to national forests by thescenery and were mostly satisfied with Forest Service recreation facilities.In the Forest Service's Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area east ofPortland, for instance, visitors said they were largely satisfied with thecondition of parking lots, roads and trails, and with the helpfulness offorest staff.

Visitors were least pleased by the cleanliness of restrooms at developedsites, with 40 percent rating that as fair or poor.

Congress, which controls the agency's budget, has complimented the newsurveys as a more reliable gauge of public use and may push other landagencies to take the same approach, Forest Service officials said. The newfigures for the first time also will let forests clearly track trends inrecreation use.

"We haven't had any backlash about the numbers going down," Kocis said. "Westill have recreation infrastructure and facilities to maintain, and I thinkeveryone realizes the value of those facilities to the public."

The new Forest Service visitor use reports are available on the Web atwww.fs.fed.us/recreation/recuse/recuse.shtml. You can reach Michael Milsteinat 503-294-7689 or by e-mail at michaelmilstein@news.oregonian.com.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^Scott SilverWild Wilderness248 NW Wilmington Ave.Bend, OR 97701

phone: 541-385-5261e-mail: ssilver@wildwilderness.orgInternet: http://www.wildwilderness.org

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material isdistributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest inreceiving this information for research and educational purposes.

[David_Parker]

Thanks for keeping us up to date Jon!